Stuart Woods has written a fun series of detective novels about an upper class private eye named Stone Barrington. Stone has an off-again on-again relationship with the lovely Arrington. A chief impediment to their committed love is the fact that if they married and she took his name, she would be Arrington Barrington. That really remains the most interesting thing I can say about Arrington.
Anne Zelenka does better. Offering advice to “A-Listers” about how to get out of a funk, she says,
The reason why my two favorite tech news blogs are Read/Write Web and Webware is because they are about the technology not about making lots of dough.
If there’s a downturn, and I hope there’s not, then we retrench. But we’ll still be able to blog, we’ll still be able to keep in touch online, we’ll still be able to do more together than we could apart… and that’s the cool thing about Web 2.0.
Anne of course is an A-Lister herself. She has the focus and intentionality of the best bloggers, people like Chris Pirillo, Denise Howell, Shelley Powers, and Doc Searls — A-Listers all. What makes these people great bloggers is that it is not all about them. There isn’t as much I/me/mine stuff in their work as you find in the work of the striving arrivistes, the self-important, and the self-anointed A-listers. Rather, these people are troupers, writing with focus and intensity, sharing themselves without making themselves the perpetual focus of everything they write. They use their talents and their personalities as lenses to focus on their subjects.
I read dozens of people whose work I rank right up there with Shelley and Chris, Doc and Denise, and Anne Z. Some of them have real “attitude,” and they’re funny and pointed and true. On the other hand, some people are just annoying and I don’t read them. How then can they be A-Listers?
[Disclosure: I take more pleasure from the artists than from the analysts. I'd rather read someone who plays a little bassoon, or who wails on the electric oboe than marinate in the public maunderings of some proto-suburban venture capricorn whiner.]
[Update -- while I was dithering about and scribbling the above, Anne Z. dropped two more posts into the conversation.]
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